for the practise, you may want to try this on your own. ethernet cards are
usually not that painful to set up (there are a few exceptions).
getting the route info down is a bit complicated, and will take you an
afternoon to get the hang of it, so we can do that for you.
1. Determine your make/model of nic card
========================================
about the nic: look at your card to determine the type of card it is.
2. Find out which driver to use
===============================
1. look in the "ethernet-howto" for your card. this will tell you which
driver to use.
2. if you can't find it in the ethernet howto (unlikely!), go to
http://www.deja.com/home_ps.shtml and do a search for your card.
3. if you can't find the driver's name in either 1 or 2 above, i'll search
for it and tell you the driver name.
3. Finding where the driver is
==============================
now, suppose you know the driver's name, say, tulip or rtl8139. what next?
you need to locate the driver.
1. do "locate tulip.o" or "rtl8139.o". this will tell you the location of
the driver.
2. if you find "tulip.c" but no "tulip.o", this means the driver is on your
system, but isn't compiled. that will be a bummer for you, but if this
is the case, let us know, and i'll walk you through it. i'd be willing
to bet that your driver is compiled.
3. Loading the driver
=====================
1. now you know the location of the driver. you need to link the driver
into kernel code. this part is distribution specific. on debian, you
will want to add the driver's name to /etc/modules. here is my
/etc/modules:
ppp
ppp_deflate
rtl8139
sg
3dfx
auto
this loads 5 drivers at boot time, one at a time. (auto isn't a driver).
just add your nic card at the beginning.
2. i don't know what you do in redhat, but i'm sure there's a nice GUI to do
it.
3. one distribution independent way of doing this is to create a local
startup script. on debian it's /etc/init.d LOCAL. you'll want to add the
line:
modprobe -a tulip.o
4. i think on redhat, it's /etc/init.d/rc.boot.
5. regardless of anything i said above, you can ALWAYS type
modprobe -a tulip.o
at an xterm or command line (as root!) to load the driver
4. Testing the driver
=====================
1. not to state the obvious, but remember, you don't have to reboot the
computer.
2. type:
ifconfig eth0 192.168.0.1 up
if you see nothing, all is well. if you see something, then something
went wrong. i'll help you diagnose what happened.
5. Using the driver
===================
1. assuming 4.2 worked (above), bring the nic down, then back up with your
correct ip address
ifconfig eth0 down
ifconfig eth0 your-ip up
replace your-ip with your ip address.
6. Routing
==========
1. you'll want to edit /etc/resolv.conf to reflect your dns server.
2. you'll want to set up your gateway with:
route add default gw gateway-ip dev eth0
where gateway-ip is your gateway's ip address.
pete